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And where did that come from? From wherever all the surprises, revelations, gritty felicities and casual epiphanies in this road movie must have come—the filmmaker’s generous spirit, her astute writing and lots of inspired improvisation by a cast that includes
Shia LaBeouf,
Riley Keough
and a group of kids who joined the production with little or no acting experience. (Ms. Lane had none, and she’s amazing.) They’re the members of a scruffy crew—many of them look to be runaways—whose newest recruit is Star, and they crisscross the Bible Belt in an old van selling magazine subscriptions, of all things, as part of a pyramid scam they understand dimly if at all.

The fluid narrative, and the electrifying soundtrack, reflect the nature of their travels. From day to day their itinerary is set by Ms. Keough’s Krystal, a ruthless entrepreneur who could pass for a faded cheerleader, and her boy-toy manager, Mr. LaBeouf’s Jake, who bridles at her control but does her bidding all the same. “American Honey” follows Star as she goes with the flow of what becomes her surrogate family, a strategy that yields some repetitious stretches over the course of a 163-minute running time: Nothing would have been lost with less time spent on partying in roadside fields or motel parking lots. Yet the group’s random fortunes could never be evoked by tightly focused drama. The film needs most of its length, and fills it with life that seems to have been caught almost miraculously on the fly.

But why should we care about these rootless kids, or even about Star, who leaves her own two kids with her raffish mother in order to break away from a vile boyfriend? One answer can be found in the sweep of the film’s ambition. The best road movies, from “Sullivan’s Travels” through “Easy Rider” and “Thelma & Louise” to “Something Wild,” portray the nation through which the road runs. This one serves as vivid video Instagrams of an America where rich and poor alike are generally good-hearted, irony-free and blandly besotted by pop culture, and where the magazine sellers, under Jake’s tutelage, reinvent the greased wheels of high-pressure salesmanship, even though what they’re selling is absurd, since precious few of their potential customers still read magazines. (
Robbie Ryan
did the distinctive cinematography, most of it handheld and some of it as jittery as the kids themselves.
Joe Bini
was the editor.)

A more specific answer grows out of the film’s clear connections to “Oliver Twist,” with Krystal as Fagin, a whole vanload of Artful Dodgers who thieve casually in the course of peddling their wares, and Star as a contemporary Oliver—impulsive, naïve and dangerously needy in her attachment to Jake, yet just as impulsively principled (she disrupts one of his devious sales pitches because what he’s saying isn’t true) and, behind the harsh makeup and beneath the tattoos, a timeless innocent who surveys what lies before her with touching expectancy.

Riley Keough and Shia LaBeouf
Photo:
Holly Horner/A24

I don’t know how Ms. Arnold works the magic she does with her actors, whether amateur or professional—Mr. LaBeouf inhabits his role with sly charm and explosive ferocity—but it’s an expansion of what she started doing more than a decade ago in her remarkable “Wasp,” which won an Oscar as the best live-action short of 2004, and in her 2009 feature “Fish Tank,” a coming-of-age story in which the 15-year-old English heroine, Mia, was played by
Katie Jarvis,
who’d never acted before.

In “American Honey,” Star comes of age slowly, painfully and ever so tentatively. Her good heart prompts her to do good deeds, small and large (saving a bee from drowning in a swimming pool, saving one crewmate from another’s drunken savagery), though her appetite for excitement can lead her astray. Her journey is the essence of astray, yet the worst of the men she meets along the way, an oil-field worker with disposable income, isn’t unkind; his gesture toward nighttime romance is having sex with her by the light of a flickering gas flare. (The best of them is a cattle-truck driver, aging and gentle, who travels with his Yorkie in the sleeper cab and actually does read magazines.)

We don’t get to know, or need to know, a lot about Star’s traveling companions. With names like Pagan, Runt and Misty, they seldom ask searching questions of one another, and Star takes them as they come. One of them, a sad waif who’s sometimes delusional, is fixated on Darth Vader as “the epitome of darkness and understanding.” He’s like a broken heart, she says, “that’s lost any hope in life.” Star is illusional—she thinks that Jake needs her, and that he can give her the love she needs in return. But she hasn’t lost hope, which is why she’s such a moving figure. “American Honey” comes to a lovely pop-orchestral climax that takes communal pleasure from the title song, followed by a heart-stopping coda that begins with a turtle’s fate hanging in the balance, and ends with nothing less than a choice between life and death. Just when you think you know what’s going to happen, the film serves up one more surprise.

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‘Diamond Men’ (2000)

In the pantheon of movies about salesmen—including “Tin Men,” “Death of a Salesman” and the documentary feature “Salesman”—this modest production sits almost unnoticed. It’s awfully good, though. The narrative follows two jewelry salesmen on a route through rural Pennsylvania. The younger man, Bobby, is played by
Donnie Wahlberg,
and the older one, Eddie, by
Robert Forster.
Mr. Forster doesn’t flinch from making Eddie forlorn, but his diamond man is brave and touching too.